Thursday, July 26, 2007

George Lucas has been caught wearing a "Han Shot First" T-shirt. I can't even tell based on the photo the bloggers are showing, but I will accept their fanatical attention to detail as authority for the claim. Still, unless and until Georget Lucas changes it back in a sure-to-be-released Super Authoritative Ultimately Remastered and Digitally Enhanced HD (not a whoring of your childhood memories) Version (TM) of Star Wars(TM), my flayed fondness for Lucas's work will continue to be a pulsating sore.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

I just saw the trailer for a movie coming this fall, Elizabeth: The Golden Age. It's a sequel to one of my favorite movies, Elizabeth, which covered the early years of Queen Elizabeth's life. Of course, it's not a historical documentary or anything like that so it's full of inaccuracies and artistic license, but it's so very interesting to see how a great person faced the enormous pressures of her station and managed to come out on top.

I was so enormously disappointed when it lost to the corny and saccharin Shakespeare in Love in the 1999 Oscars. I saw that movie and wanted my 10 bucks and 2 hours back; imagine my dismay when it won all those Oscars.

The new film should have some exciting action scenes with the English taking on the famed Spanish Armada. Take a look at the trailer ~~ how can this not be an awesome movie? I pray I don't find out.

Germans say that the Earth is actually 5 mm smaller in diameter than previously thought. I want to know what kind of sig-figs they're working with when they're talking about measuring distances using radio-lag. They say they can measure distances to "the preciseness of two millimetres per 1,000 kilometres (0.07 inches per 621 miles)." I guess that's pretty precise.... But if they measured the diameter of the Earth to be 12,756.274 km using a network of 70 radio satellites, it seems like that's a lot of +/- 2mm errors to account for....

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

With the Independence Day weekend (huzzah, America!) upon us, I've been reading reviews for movies on the off chance that a movie might be the escape-tool of choice for my friends and family. I've never been a fan of the idea of a live-action Transformers movie; there's no way you can top the Transformers movie from 1984 (or wutever) in my mind. [music] You've got the TOUCH! You've got the POWER!!! [/music]

But I'm reading the reviews anyway because some of my friends have expressed interest in it. I normally like Roger Ebert's reviews a lot because he writes about movies very well and generally has valid points even if I don't agree with his overall review. Often he cues me in to some movie arcania. For instance, in the Transformer's review, he says, "... Megatron crash-landed near the North Pole a century ago and possesses the Allspark, which is the key to something, I'm not sure what, but since it's basically an alien MacGuffin it doesn't much matter. (Note to fanboys about to send me an e-mail explaining the Allspark: Look up "MacGuffin" in Wikipedia.)"

Now, I have no idea what the "Allspark" is. It sounds like some baking ingredient, but for semiconductor doping or something. But looking up MacGuffin in wikipedia shows that the users have already added Ebert's reference as an example. Hehe. Cute.